Economists are often unpopular with other academics: we have a tendency to point out things they don’t want to hear. Here’s conservative columnist George Will giving “The Speech Every 2015 College Grad Needs to Hear”: That’s harsh. FWIW: SUU students tend to be much better grounded than the typical American... Continue reading

I’ve had the good fortune of living in some magical places (and taking the salary cuts that go with that hedonic income). Currently I live in southern Utah. You know … southern Utah … red rock, canyons, mountains, high desert.... Continue reading

I like the video from fivethirtyeight.com entitled “How Data Nerds Found a 131-Year Old Sunken Treasure” (you must click through to watch the video). It’s a fun story, but the fun is cool because embedded in it is some decent finance for a business student. The backstory is that one... Continue reading

Welfare is a loaded word. No one wants to admit that they receive welfare—it’s always someone else. But that’s a fib. Let me define welfare as a voluntary exchange where 1) you are receiving more than you give up, and... Continue reading

Holman Jenkins: As the late economist and social thinker Mancur Olson taught, political bargains of the past are the burden of the future. The U.S., like California, is a country that has grown old thinking of itself as young. By... Continue reading

Alex Tabarrok riffs on Arthur C. Clarke: Perhaps any sufficiently advanced logic is indistinguishable from stupidity. He’s discussing the observation that lots of smart people don’t think the expert systems increasingly built into machines are really that smart. For my... Continue reading

Perhaps you should check out Asshole Parents – where parents post pictures of their kids tantrums with a skinny on the lame cause. For example: Took my daughter on an African safari but I won’t let her play on her... Continue reading

Fair is a loaded word. That’s the word little kids use, often to get something. The thing is about fairness is, that it’s a concept that’s rarely used by those who have more to justify their position. I’m not saying that’s good or bad; what I’m saying is that you... Continue reading

Fredrik de Boer in his post entitled “Maybe Time for Change”: … The pressure to avoid criticizing current progressive practice is intense. … … … Within progressivism today, there is an absolute lack of shame or self-criticism about reducing racial... Continue reading

The idea that it’s better to buy local (food or whatever) is one the drives economists nuts. This is because it’s basically a repudiation, without evidence, of what we teach in the first few weeks of the first principles course: comparative advantage. Here’s a video of Pierre Desrochers discussing the... Continue reading

If costs are higher in one location than another, market forces will push them closer to each other, given enough time. How much time? Well, in the case of the U.S. and China … as much time as we’ve let... Continue reading

I’m a sucker for choropleths: maps shaded by the incidence of some other variable. A geographer has mapped out the U.S. based on which swear words people use in their tweets. Here’s the map for the hot, new, swear word:... Continue reading

Via Alex Tabarrok quotes John Stuart Mill: Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error. Just because they’re loud, doesn’t make them right. Technorati Tags: mill,quote,zealous,truth,error Continue reading

I’ve made two points before in my series on why macro is so hard: A lot of crap gets passed off as expert opinion in macroeconomics. We focus too much on prices and not enough on quantities (a corollary to... Continue reading

Who’s Hayek? Well, at a superficial level, he’s a dead white guy. More constructively, he was an Austrian economist, who worked most of his career (from the 1920’s to the 1980’s) in London and Chicago. He won one of the first Nobel Prizes awarded in economics (in 1974), mostly for... Continue reading

In traditional societies, people don’t trade much with each other. They live in family groups, in a region dominated by a clan or tribe. In modern societies, people do trade with each other a lot. You’re trading with me right now: you’re probably taking my class, I’ve put this out... Continue reading

So … I have no doubt that most leaders, politicians, and bureaucrats mean well. The thing is, meaning well, and accomplishing good things aren’t the same. Hayek’s notion of this was that laws and legislation are different things. What you and I normally think of as a law — something... Continue reading

What if a young woman started dating a guy who presumed that doing the same things our federal government does routinely were OK in a relationship? Meet Guv. He wants to keep you safe from all the dangers out there … terrorists … marijuana … transfats. He’s sure he’s not... Continue reading

What if a young woman started dating a guy who presumed that doing the same things our federal government does routinely were OK in a relationship? Meet Guv. He loves loans — they’re the best part of home ownership. He’s massively in debt … but it’s other people’s debt. Click... Continue reading

What if a young woman started dating a guy who presumed that doing the same things our federal government does routinely were OK in a relationship? Meet Guv. He’d definitely contribute … to getting your friend hit by a car. He’s not a doctor … but he’s pretty sure he... Continue reading

Here’s John Cochrane (economist from the business school at the University of Chicago, and blogger at The Grumpy Economist): Taxis suck because in most cities government officials make intentional policy choice that encourage them to suck, and protect them from consumers when they do suck. Then along came Uber. And... Continue reading

“Every price is a marvel. A wonder!” This is a central message of economics: prices embody tons of information that’s useful and hard to obtain otherwise. The implication of this is that prices allow us to make decisions in a decentralized setting. What is a decentralized setting? Well, first, what's... Continue reading

Prices are a way to summarize information. This video shows how prices summarize a lot of information that we don’t need to know so that we can act as if we do know it: Hayek was the first to point out the central conceit of command and control decision-making. Markets... Continue reading